Mind Out Of Time
by cloudmonet
Summary: Newlyweds Kim and Ron participate in a telepathy experiment. A dangerous terrorist escapes from a Chinese prison.
1. Doing Time

**Mind Out Of Time**

**Part 1**

**Doing Time**

_Kim Possible, Ron Stoppable, Rufus, Monique, and Sumo Ninja are characters from the Kim Possible show, created by Mark McCorkle and Bob Schooley, owned and copyright © by the Walt Disney Company. The story takes place in April of Kim and Ron's sophomore year of college, nearly three years after "So the Drama," and not long after my earlier story, "Orinoco." This story © 2006 by cloudmonet. This is part one of a three part story._

* * *

Spring had come at last to the stony plain, a wasteland somewhere in western China tucked between mountains just as barren. The Chinese bureaucrats had names for these hills, as did the various American defense agencies. Otherwise, they were known only to people truly obsessed with the details of geography, and the guards and prisoners of Jao Dung Prison.

In a large, brightly-lit room with discolored white walls, a huge Japanese man in a hot magenta jumpsuit was hunched over an industrial sewing machine, hemming the edges of small pieces of brightly-colored flowered fabric, not that any of the pieces were big enough to show an entire flower.

The Pakistani man sitting next to him grumbled in English, one of two languages the pair had in common. "If my sister were ever to wear anything like this, I would whip her to death in the arena."

"Shut up, Al," grunted Sumo Ninja. "Thinking of the hot American babes who're gonna wear these keeps me happy."

Ali Abdullah glowered. "I was gonna blow up America, and now I'm sewing bikinis for Smarty Mart. I should have blown up China."

"We got not even the bomb," said Ho Zhomp, the Malaysian man sitting behind Abdullah. He was hemming in the spaghetti strings of a top.

"Losers," said Sumo Ninja. "You had an invisible plane and you got shot down. What's up with that?"

"Loser yourself," said Abdullah, hemming the front triangle of a bright green thong. "You're a prisoner, too."

"No shame in that. I crossed paths with the Ghost and Kim Possible. Gave 'em some real trouble, too." Sumo Ninja put the finished string bikini top on his pile and picked up the hourglass shaped piece of cloth and ties for the bottom.

"Good thing you saw not the local girls at our base, Al," said Ho Zhomp, who was hemming the leg holes of a French-cut bottom. "They go all nude."

Sumo Ninja laughed, hemming the edges of his own bottom. "That's a good one. You prudish terrorists put your secret base near a nude beach. Who would think?"

"Not correct," said Ho Zhomp. "Our base sited up Borneo hills. They wild jungle girls."

"Sounds like fun," said Sumo Ninja. "Ya do any of 'em?"

"What means do them?" Ho asked.

Sumo Ninja said something in Chinese while hemming the tie strings into his flowered bottom.

"Do them means clouds and rain. Ohhh!"

"You read too much Chinese poetry, not enough Koran," said Ali Abdullah.

"You don't wanna do naked jungle babes?" asked Sumo Ninja.

"They're more not pretty," said Ho Zhomp. "Too much tattoos and scars."

"So you do look at 'em," said Sumo Ninja. "Ha! Gotcha there!"

"You guys speak the words of Satan," said Ali Abdullah.

"Sure, why not? I'm an evil ninja. But you know what? Even good men look at babes!" He held up the flowered bottom as if inspecting it for flaws. "Honey! I wanna see you in this!" In his enthusiasm, his voice scrawked like a crow.

A young Chinese guard with an automatic rifle walked down the aisle between machines, saying, "Less talk, more work," in Chinese. His companion, a stern-faced older woman, fondled her coiled bullwhip as she walked behind him.

When they were done with their rounds, the young man whispered in the woman's ear, in a dialect the prisoners probably didn't know, "May I ask why, if we want them to talk, we keep forcing them to be quiet?"

"I think you're clever enough to reach your own understanding of this," she replied. "I'll expect you to explain it to me when you report for duty tomorrow."

————————————————

"Okay, here's the deal," Belinda Brockmeyer told Kim and Ron Stoppable, who were sitting on the edge of the double bed in their dorm room while she sat in the upholstered swivel chair, playing with a green plastic ruler. "Dr. Hurlbetter of the psychology department has developed what more or less amounts to a telepathy machine and needs suitable test subjects."

"I don't know," said Ron. "We've heard rumors about that machine supposed to make people go mental in a big way."

"Uh huh," agreed Rufus, Ron's pet naked mole rat, who was perched on his shoulder.

"That's exaggerated," said Belinda.

"I don't want to get major mood swings," said Kim.

"Ah, no," Ron agreed. "No offense," he added quickly.

Kim smiled at him.

"Yeah, okay, people have had problems," Belinda admitted, "but let me explain why you two would be ideal subjects."

"Okay, but I'm not looking at your eyes while you try to persuade me," said Ron.

Rufus closed his eyes and covered them with his front paws.

Kim gave Ron a raised eyebrow then turned to Belinda. "Go on," she said, crossing her arms.

"Well, the idea behind the machine is it gives a direct brain-to-brain linkage through a noninvasive interface," Belinda explained. "You could use a machine like this to communicate with someone in a deep coma, for example. All those people in hospital beds with tubes in their arms who can't talk or move, you could find out if their minds are still functioning. If they are, this gives them a way to communicate."

"Sounds like a great idea, if it's used that way," said Kim. "I can think of some pretty terrible misuses for it."

Ron mimed putting on a helmet and affected a sinister voice. "And now, Dr. McDuff, I will learn everything you know about the photon phaser antimatter cruise missile! Booyah ha ha ha ha!"

Rufus gave a squeak of fear, scampered across the bed to his nest box, and burrowed under the shredded paper towels.

"Just kidding, little buddy," Ron said, and Rufus cautiously looked at him.

"Yeah, and how about this one?" Kim said, dropping the pitch of her voice, "Resistance is futile, Miss Brockmeyer. I will now learn everything about your conspiracy against the Eternal Benevolent Government, and, uh—" She went back to her normal voice, "I'll also learn everything about your sex life, and spill the details to your mom."

"Very funny," said Belinda. "The reality is, the contact is total, both ways. And that's our problem, finding two people who can handle the intimacy."

"Oh!" said Kim, turning her head and meeting Ron's brown eyes. "Hmm—"

"You two have been best friends and constant companions since you were four years old. You know each other so thoroughly, you can't have many barriers."

"I like to think we don't," said Kim.

"You want to do it, don'tcha?" asked Ron.

"I think it could be a really beautiful experience," said Kim. "You're scared it could be weird."

"No duh."

"What do you think I don't know about you?"

"Well—"

"You think this is some kind of mad science," said Kim.

"Not all mad scientists have henchmen and lairs. Some have grad students and National Science Foundation grants." Ron affected a Gollum-voice. "Publissh! I mussst Publissh paperss! Seriously, Kim. And you know how I feel about psychologists. Taking the course is evil enough."

Kim looked at Belinda. "When Ron was traumatized by his summer at Camp Wannaweep, his mom made him see a child psychologist. I don't think the psychologist helped him."

"So— not— helpful—" Ron said slowly and emphatically.

"Ron, this isn't about changing who either of you are," said Belinda. "It's about fine-tuning a potentially important medical tool. It's either too amped up, offering total oneness to people who don't want it, or tuned so low it doesn't work. We need two people who can handle the total contact so we can figure out how to make the adjustments."

"You're not gonna have some psychologist in your head, Ron. You'll have me."

"Well—"

"I really want to do this," said Kim. "Whatever we share will be good."

Ron looked into Kim's moist green eyes and embraced her. "Okay babe, okay," he whispered. "Why the watery eyes? You almost never cry."

"I don't know," she whispered back. "This is really 'portant."

She said that the way she would have when she was a small child.

————————————————

"You're really gonna do that?" Monique asked Kim and Ron. They were sitting in the Student Union Cafeteria together, eating sloppy joes. "After hearin' what Yvonne told me 'bout trying that machine, uh-uh, no way, too weird, never gonna try it."

"So what kind of weird are we talking about?" asked Kim.

"All kinds of stuff in your head just gets exposed, you know, stuff you'd never want to tell anybody. Don't tell me you two don't have secrets from each other. I know better. I've watched you not tell each other so much obvious stuff—"

"Recently?" asked Kim.

"No, but that don't matter. Anything that ever happened is recently when you're looking in each other's heads with that machine."

Rufus ate a couple of Ron's French fries and looked toward Monique.

"You think you got yourselves fit together perfectly, gold rings and all. Beautiful wedding. But you know, you make it work by hiding stuff that doesn't fit so well, forgetting other stuff you might have done. Should Ron be a freelance commando for truth and justice, or a world-class chef baking 'seven layers of heaven' for cable TV?"

"Hey, I'm good at cooking, but I never wanted to be a cook," said Ron.

"You sure?" asked Monique. "Cause Kim's gonna interact with that, maybe some part of Kim that doesn't like you so well, and then what happens? What about cheerleader Kim? She's gotta be frustrated 'bout how life's goin' now."

"No big," said Kim. "Ron, world-saving, school, cheerleading— something had to go. College is a lot harder than high school, if I want to be serious and do well."

"No duh," Monique agreed. "But you hear what I'm saying. You're gold now. Why mess with what works? How you gonna handle feeling each other crush on other people?"

"We've talked about that stuff," said Ron.

"Talking and reexperiencing, so not the same!" said Monique.

"It's my hero thing," said Kim. "Making it possible to communicate with comatose people? That's beautiful."

Rufus licked the last bit of ketchup from Ron's empty plate of French fries.

Monique looked around the room to make sure nobody was paying attention. Everyone else was talking at their own table, and the jukebox was playing pop songs. "Yvonne won't get on a motorcycle now," Monique said, dropping her voice. "I promised I wouldn't tell, but I gotta tell you."

Kim and Ron looked at her, puzzled by this remark.

Rufus looked longingly at Monique's French fries, but she was guarding then well.

"You get creeped out when Belinda makes prophecies? How you gonna feel when you make your own?"

"What do you mean?" asked Kim.

"I guess there's some part of a human mind that knows what's gonna happen, but it's blocked off, hmm? This machine unblocks that. Yvonne remembered her future, came out of the session thinking she was in a hospital with casts and all that from a bad motorcycle accident, thinking she had a head injury and couldn't talk."

"That is pretty freaky," said Ron.

"She didn't tell the doctor, didn't tell no one but me, and you don't say nothin' to no one either, hear? She figures the less she talks and thinks about it, the less energy she feeds it. She loved her bike like you love yours, but she sold it, won't get on a bike ever again. What if you learn you get killed savin' the world? Would you still save it?"

"Sure," said Kim. "I'd appreciate the warning and change my tactics."

"She can do anything," Ron said with a smile.

————————————————

The stern-faced Chinese woman glared at the huge Japanese man in the magenta prison uniform. They were in the interrogation room. She spoke a phrase of Arabic. "Do you ever hear them saying that?" she asked in Chinese.

"Not sure," Sumo Ninja replied. "Maybe some of the words, or similar words."

"Does Ali Abdullah talk to the Malay men much?"

"In English, in Chinese, not so much in Arabic. I don't much understand Arabic yet."

"You disappoint me, Sumo Ninja," said the woman. "I have that phrase on many recordings of them. It's an insult directed at me. It means—"

This narration will omit what it means.

"These terrorists are disrespectful of powerful women like yourself, Madam Tsing," said Sumo Ninja.

"That's not the point!" she snapped. "Audio devices have limitations. People mumble. Not every sound gets picked up perfectly. Your sole value to me right now is your ninja-trained hearing. If you can't recognize a phrase which repeatedly comes up in their conversation—"

"You wish to know when they insult you?"

"If that phrase means me, it can go with words about what I might be doing or thinking. I'm watching them, they're watching me. I want to know what they see." Madam Tsing repeated the Arabic phrase, then a couple of shorter variations. "Those all mean me," she said. "Do they say them much when I'm not around, when I haven't questioned them for awhile?"

"Please repeat the short versions."

She did.

"Yes, they say those things, in long sentences."

"Let me think," she said, looking through her Chinese/Arabic dictionary and phrase book. "How about, the characterization omitted was in a foul mood today?" She translated this to Arabic, repeated it a couple of times till it came out smoothly.

"Yes, I have heard that," said Sumo Ninja.

"Good. We may get somewhere. How about, I hate that characterization omitted?" She repeated this in Arabic.

"I've heard Khi Myong say that."

"Of course, what I'm most concerned about is discussion of my movements, my routine, anything that might facilitate an escape or other trouble. Well, let's go over phrases and words that may be used to discuss these situations. Whether you've heard things like this or not, I want you to learn them." Madam Tsing thumbed through her book and recited more Arabic phrases.

————————————————

A gray-haired, goateed professor in a white lab coat opened the office door. "I am Avrum Hurlbetter, professor of psychology," he said, with a slight accent. "You would be Mr. and Mrs. Stoppable?"

"Yes," said Kim.

"You're Jewish, aren't you, Mr. Stoppable?" the professor asked Ron. "Not that this is relevant, but so am I."

"I'm not, like, orthodox or anything," Ron replied.

Dr. Hurlbetter chuckled. "And you're childhood sweethearts who got married."

"Something like that," said Kim.

"Such marriages are the happiest and most durable, for those who are lucky enough to make such a match. Often close association in childhood causes the relationship to become more like that of a brother and sister."

"We've experienced that," said Kim.

"Fortunately, we got over it," said Ron, briefly clasping her hand.

"Yes, fortunately," she agreed.

"Well, that's good," said Dr. Hurlbetter. "I don't know how much Miss Brockmeyer told you about our telepathy machine, so I hope I don't bore you."

"It's all about communicating with people in comas, you need to adjust the sensitivity so it's not overwhelming, and you think Ron and I can handle it till you get it set right," said Kim.

"I should have you write abstracts for my professional papers," said the professor. "You have a talent for summary."

"Comes from years of interrupting and summarizing rants," said Kim, "not that I would put you in the mad scientist category, of course."

Dr. Hurlbetter smiled amiably. "There are understandable fears and concerns about how my machine could be misused, but really it does give both parties quite equal access to each other's minds, which should reduce the chances of this."

"Belinda suggested we might get, um, course credit for participating—" said Ron.

"Well, yes, assuming you can handle the first session and are willing to come back for more. I have yet to find any experimental subjects who weren't disturbed in some way by their experiences. Volunteers are getting harder to find."

"All the more reason to give us what we want," said Ron. "It's only fair. The time we spend here is time we can't spend on regular studies."

"Let's try one session and see how it goes. I'll get you credit for writing a paper or something, if you'll give me a full account of your experiences. Some people flat out refuse to tell me anything."

"We'll tell you everything we can," said Kim. "You understand that some of my missions involve classified or top secret information, and if we reexperience stuff like that, I'll have to tell you there's stuff I can't tell you."

"Kim Possible, if I may still use your famous maiden name," said Dr. Hurlbetter, "ordinarily, I wouldn't want such an extraordinary subject for experimental work, but I've failed completely with ordinary folks."

"We've still got the KP logo on all our vehicles and gear," said Ron, "but I started calling her KS after the wedding and she likes that."

Kim smiled and said, "Oh, you!"

"This is so refreshing," said the professor. "I usually get to see couples who've gotten themselves in some kind of trouble. You take genuine delight in each other."

————————————————

"Three stripes," Ali Abdullah told Sumo Ninja, in English. "I bowed toward the holy city and prayed while she whipped my naked back. What does she do to you?"

"She doesn't whip me, Al," Sumo Ninja said. His voice could have the most irritating scrawk whenever he spoke above a mumble. "Don't know why she whips you, unless it's because you're a stinking terrorist."

"You worked for us."

"The money was good, and I didn't know who was paying. Now that I do—" he made a noise of disgust.

Abdullah made a threatening pose and Sumo Ninja laughed.

"You don't want me to throw you down with a bloody back, do you, Al?"

"If I learn you've betrayed us—"

"We're probably being recorded, you know. Think they don't understand English, or Arabic, or Pashto, or whatever else you choose to babble?"

Abdullah dropped his voice to ask, "You know where the microphones are?"

Sumo Ninja laughed. "What? You think I'm doing clouds and rain with her to get her to tell me stuff like that? Don't be silly, Al! Huh. I've been locked up too long. She is starting to look cute."

"You're disgusting."

Before Ali Abdullah knew what happened, Sumo Ninja flipped him to the hard floor on his back. He would have screamed in pain, but the breath was knocked out of him.

"When talking to a man who is big and strong as a mountain, but swift as the wind, it is wise to be polite," Sumo Ninja said quietly.

Khi Myong, the small Malaysian who shared their cell, waved his hands in a gesture of negation, saying, "No trouble, sir, no trouble," in heavily accented English.

Sumo Ninja smiled, and lay down on his mat.

————————————————

Kim sat down on a reclining chair in the middle of a small room and placed the lightweight helmet on her head. A bundle of wires led to some electronic gear and a computer.

"Can you record thoughts with this gear?" Kim asked.

Dr. Hurlbetter chuckled. "Now that would be a breakthrough! But, fortunately perhaps, no. There's way too much going on. Only another human mind can possibly sort through all the noise to perceive a signal. It's be like recording the sound from fifty televisions tuned to different channels and trying to sort anything out. But if you're actually in the room with this, with concentration you can hear what you want to hear."

"Ron would probably get confused. He's easily distracted. Oooh, I hope he can make sense of my thoughts. I'll try to stay focused."

"Does Ron have an attention deficit disorder?" Dr. Hurlbetter asked.

"He can focus when he really wants to," said Kim.

"No, for your work it's good for him to be that way. While you're fighting, he'll notice things off to the side that you don't notice, things that might threaten your lives."

"That's so true," said Kim. "You are perceptive, aren't you?"

"If you're ready, I'll dim the lights. You may want to close your eyes as well, to focus your attention inward."

————————————————

Ron heard Kim's voice in the dark, calling his name.

"Kim?" he asked.

"Hey," she said. "I guess it's working."

"Big whoop! This is just like a phone call in the dark, only I think we're not actually talking."

"babe, it's more than that. I've been here before."

"Oh yeah, in my body, when the brain switch machine switched our brains."

"I don't think it actually did that," said Kim. "I think it did something like this, only instead of being together, we switched places. I'm feeling the shape of your body from the inside, the strength in your muscles. It's familiar."

"Really?"

"I didn't say this back then, but you've got a pretty good body. I mean, I had little trouble making it do most of my usual stunts, though it hurt some afterwards. You feel quite a bit stronger now."

"All that martial arts practice with you," said Ron.

"Mmm—"

"Kim?"

"I wish we could, you know, get sweet, hooked up to this thing. Wouldn't that be fun?"

"Kim!"

"You agree with me. I can feel you."

In a warm softness under blankets and sheets, skin against skin.

"A memory, sweetheart?" Kim whispered. "I'm liking the way I make you feel."

"No duh. I love you, Kim."

Suddenly Ron was tumbling through space, no, flying through the air with his jetpack, catching a falling Kim under her arms.

"Nice," she said, and Ron felt the warm glow of her happiness. "Be careful, sweetheart, it's still a long way down," she added.

Ron was standing in the shadows of the trees in the park, upwind from Kim, who just sneezed from the pollen of the special orchid he was holding, which somehow ended the terrible gradual disappearance of her body. She was back, she was whole, she felt like herself again. She was embracing Josh Mankey, but looking over his shoulder at Ron, who was trying to smile away the tears he felt like weeping.

"Excuse me," Kim told Josh, pushing him away from her and running toward Ron, wrapping her arms around him and looking into his eyes. "This is what I should have done, sweetheart," she said. "I never should have caused you any pain."

"Wow, KP, I'm confused."

"I'm KS now, your wife!"

"But we're in high school."

Kim suddenly felt uncertain. "I want to be with you always," she said. "I don't want to be with him or anyone else. I know you love me, and I love you, and I don't care what anybody thinks. You should be my boyfriend."

Kim and Ron were children sitting in Ron's backyard on plastic chairs, with a tablecloth spread over a cardboard box, and two paper plates with cheese sandwiches and sliced apples, pretending they were on a date.

"Um, okay, I guess, sure," said Ron.

"Now you need a 'gagement ring," said Kim, handing him a keyring with no keys on it. "This could be the 'gagement ring."

Ron looked at the empty keyring dubiously.

"We should eat our sandwiches first," said Kim.

"Okay," said Ron, and took a big bite.

"And I say stuff like, 'This is a nice rest'rant,' and you say stuff like, 'You look nice, Kimmie.' "

"Mumple murph," said Ron.

Kim made a face. "Don't talk with your mouth full," she said. "That's so gross."

Ron swallowed. "Sorry," he said.

"That's 'kay," she said, with a smile. "So you wanted to ask me something?"

"What am I spozed to do?" asked Ron.

"Well, you kneel on the floor, or the grass, and show me the 'gagement ring, and ask me to marry you."

The little boy kneeled on the grass beside the little girl's chair, holding her right hand with his left. "Like this?" he asked, looking into his friend's beautiful green eyes.

————————————————

"Ron, how old are we?" asked Kim, in quiet darkness.

"I know I'm bad at math, but this is ridiculous," he replied. "I can't get my mind around how numbers work, or what a year should be."

"Kinda dreamlike, as though the touching parts of our minds are timeless."

"I'm thinking the cheese sandwiches, the keyring, that was a long time ago."

"Yeah, I guess," Kim agreed.

Kim was with Monique in the terminal of an airport, probably Middleton International, but it was hard to be sure. She saw Ron with his suitcases and ran to embrace him. It just was a brief hug but she felt—

No, it was a much longer hug. She was wearing a thin blue dress, practically melting into his arms while the lights changed color and swirled. He was slightly taller than her now. She didn't care that he was wearing that ill-fitting light blue tux with the ridiculous ruffled shirt. She looked into those deep brown eyes.

He looked into those emerald green eyes, seeing all the love of his childhood reflected back at him.

One kiss merged with another. The clothes they were wearing changed, the setting changed, the position of the rest of their bodies changed, but the kiss was one kaleidoscope of love.

"So we're in love," said Kim. "Or is this your imagination? Is this how I look to you? I'm overwhelming you, flooding your senses with smooth, warm, wow!"

"Can I feel how you feel it?" Ron asked.

"Welcome, sweetheart."

"We are in love," said Ron.

"It's a very secure feeling," said Kim, "your presence always with me, guarding me and protecting me. You seem uncertain."

"I'm guarding you?"

"With you fighting by my side, I can do anything, or even with you just cheering me on. You protect me from my doubt."

"I make you feel like that?" Ron asked, his mind wandering toward moments of skin against skin.

"Boys really do only think about that!"

"I just want to, you know, learn what feels best to you."

"It's not how you touch me, but how you love me."

Ron was standing on the altar, watching Kim's dad escorting her down the center aisle of the church. Now he was kissing her. They were dancing, somewhere, kissing again. That white gown, bare shoulders, and long red hair!

"See, we're married," said Kim.

Kim and Ron were sitting next to each other on a couch in an old room with pale striped wallpaper. Kim had a baby girl on her lap who was wearing a sleeper. "Daddy's got your foot," Ron kept saying, moving the baby's foot around while she gave him a biggie grin.

"What's her name?" asked Kim. "This is awful! I can't remember her name."

"Bye, Mom, bye, Dad," the teenaged girl said, hugging them both before bouncing toward a yellow school bus.

"Bye, Marlena," said Kim. "Okay, her name's Marlena. Wait a moment, we can't possibly be that old, can we? You're going bald."

"Well, I got strong male hormones, babe."

"Oh, you!"

"I guess we must be this old."

"What do we do?" asked Kim. "I don't remember anything but being heroes. You know, kicking bad guy butt and saving people from natural disasters."

"Oh, Kimberly, we haven't done that for a long time," Ronald said with a voice that sounded shaky and wheezy.

"Ronald, don't try to walk without your cane."

He gasped and collapsed on the floor. Kimberly cried and cried. "Ronald! Ronald! Don't leave me all alone!"

There was nothing but darkness and silence.

"Ron?" asked Kim. "You're not really dead, are you?"

"I'm trying to understand what we're experiencing. Either we're both dead now, and going over our lives together before, well, whatever comes next, or, I kind of remember we're doing a telepathy experiment with Professor Hurlbetter's machine—"

"Right. What's real? I mean, all this stuff. Are we married? Are we lovers? Cause if we're not, I want to do that."

"Oh, that's real!" said Ron.

"Are you sure? Cause you're lying on a hospital bed, with tubes in your arms and bags of fluid, and I'm holding your wrinkled hand with tears in my eyes, and Marlena's got her arm around my waist, handing me tissues and brushing my long white hair. You just had a stroke, I think. Maybe that's where we are, why we're using the telepathy machine. I'm trying to find you, trying to bring you back. Ron, it feels so real! Come back to me!"

"Kim, I haven't gone anywhere. I'm right here. We're in college at Northwestern State University, hooked up to Avrum Hurlbetter's machine. Okay. I remember being the old dude in the hospital bed with the tubes. I don't know how. I saw you crying, crying, crying, and tried to get up to comfort you, and found I was somehow out of my body, and you were crying even more, and— I blew it! I'm so dead."

"Ron, no—"

"Ya got that right. I think I know what happens. Whatever part of your mind and my mind that are touching— it's like timeless— not past, present, or future, but all there at once. That's why we can't figure out where in this continuum of life we really are. Unhook the machine, we're back in college. Remember, some of his test subjects had strange reactions to the intimacy of telepathy? He wanted us because we spend our whole lives together."

"But Ron— your stroke! We used the machine again. We really are old. If we're not, everything that will happen to us is predestined. The future's as real as the past."

"Nah, I think you can change it."

————————————————

Ron opened his eyes. As Kim said, he was lying in a hospital bed, IV tubes taped to his wrinkled hands, a telepathy helmet on his head. He looked at Kim, who removed her own telepathy helmet from her long white hair and smiled through her tears. "Baby," she said, pulling his head toward her breasts and covering it with little kisses. "You came back to me, you came back. I love you so much."

"Kimmie," he said with a wheezy whisper. "Will you marry me? I gotta a 'gagement ring for you."

"Yes, Ron, yes," she said, gently kissing the old man's dry lips. "I'll marry you every time you forget we've already been married for fifty nine years!"

————————————————

Kim opened her eyes to the gradually brightening light in the room, and stared at her young hands.

"The machine's off, isn't it, doctor? This is real, now, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Dr. Hurlbetter. "What did you experience?"

"So far beyond freaky," Kim said.

"You, too?"

"Ron and I remembered the future, really far in the future," Kim explained. "We were nearly eighty, and he had a stroke, and we were using a machine like this one for me to find him and make him conscious again, and it worked, and, where's my pack?"

She got off the chair, found it in the corner, pulled out her compact, and looked at her face in the small round mirror. To her relief, her skin was smooth, her hair red.

"I just experienced coming out of trance in Ron's hospital room, as an old woman. It's like I came out twice, and now I'm not sure how many times I'm gonna come out before I'm in the real reality."

"This is extraordinary. Can you start at the beginning of your experience and try to recreate it for me?" The professor asked gently. "You can gloss over anything embarrassing or intimate if you wish."

Kim gave him a quizzical look.

"You're newlyweds. I'd be very surprised if you didn't share some thoughts of a sexual nature."

"Yeah, we did, a few times. It was all about our relationship, from childhood to old age, but it was kinda random, out of order, free-associated."

"Can you start at the beginning, and—"

"Yeah, sure. My first thought was, I'm better at staying focused, so I went out in the dark calling Ron's name, and he called back to me, and then we were together in Ron's head. I know cause I could feel how his body feels from the inside—"

Belinda knocked on the door. "Dr. Hurlbetter, Ron wants to ask Kim a question."

"I bet I know exactly what he's gonna ask," said Kim. "Better let him do it if you want to compare us."

"Okay," the professor told Belinda, who opened the door.

"Uh, Kim," said Ron. "Should I tell Belinda any private intimate stuff?"

"It's okay," Kim replied. "This is important. This is gonna save lives. You don't have to be, like, graphic, though."

"Oh, okay, gottcha," Ron said, and left the room with Belinda.

————————————————

The cell door opened. A guard pointed his automatic rifle at Sumo Ninja and led him away.

Ali Abdullah whispered to Khi Myong in Arabic, "Now, my friend, I will show you what can be made from stretch polyester besides garments for shameless women." He applied a small wad of what looked like chewing gum to the steel doorframe and heated it with a cigarette lighter. It began foaming, dissolving the metal like a strong acid. "No alarm, and no latch," he said. "In a minute and a half, Wang Tsu will walk by. His automatic rifle will prove most useful."

"I follow your lead, sir," Khi Myong replied.

* * *

_Continued in Time Out of Mind, Part 2: Dress Rehearsal_


	2. Dress Rehearsal

**Mind Out Of Time**

**Part 2:**

**Dress Rehearsal**

_Kim Possible, Ron Stoppable, Rufus, Wade Load, and Felix Renton are characters from the Kim Possible show, created by Mark McCorkle and Bob Schooley, owned and copyright © by the Walt Disney Company. The story takes place in May of Kim and Ron's sophomore year of college, three years after "So the Drama," and not long after "Mind Out Of Time, Part 1: Doing Time." A shorter version of this story won second prize in Taechunsa's March 2006 short story contest at Ron Stoppable's Really Neat Page. This story © 2006 by cloudmonet. This is part two of a three part story._

* * *

"Ron, we're running out of gas," said Kim.

"But it was full when we left—"

The motor made chugging noises. The tricked-out black Toyota hybrid quickly lost speed, falling below a hundred miles an hour. The distant cloud of dust in the rearview looked a bit closer. "It's not just the gauge, Ron. I'll switch to electric."

With a whine and a whistle the electric motor took over.

"They're gaining," said Ron.

Rufus, his pet naked molerat, climbed up the backseat to look out the rear window, panicked, and ran back to the front and dived into Ron's pocket.

"I can't make it go faster than seventy five," Kim complained. "I mean fifty. Whoa! The battery's nearly dead."

"They sabotaged our car," said Ron.

"There's no cover!" said Kim. For several miles on each side of the road, there was nothing but flat, barren ground.

_Dot dot dadot!_ beeped the kimmunicator.

An explosive fireball engulfed the little car, and consciousness flamed into blackness.

————————————————

"I hate it when we die," said Ron's voice in the dark.

"It's okay, baby, we're not dead," Kim replied with a soothing, confident tone. "We can change this."

"How old were we when this happened?"

"What am I wearing?"

"Regular mission clothes, black turtleneck croptop—"

————————————————

"Look at me carefully," said Kim, driving the tricked-out black Toyota hybrid at a marginally insane speed down a two-lane desert road.

"I think we're getting away from them," said Ron.

Rufus climbed up the backseat to look out the rear window, shook his head, and scampered back to the front and sat on Ron's left shoulder.

"Does my tummy have stretch marks? Do my eyes have wrinkles? Can you guess how old I am?"

"We just remembered this mission on the telepathy machine, like, last week!" said Ron, his voice rising toward panic. "We're gonna die. I can't remember how we fixed it. Do you?"

Rufus seemed puzzled about why Ron was so upset.

"We run out of gas, the battery goes dead, the kimmunicator beeps, and the car explodes," said Kim.

"There's a bomb in the car," said Ron.

"Probably a time bomb," Kim said, and stomped on the brakes, laying a long patch of rubber on the road before grinding to a halt. The distant cloud of dust in the rearview mirror was gaining fast.

Ron stuffed Rufus in his pocket. "Stay there, buddy."

"Run to the rocks," said Kim.

They got out, leaped a barbed-wire fence, and scrambled toward the rocks. On impulse, Kim tackled Ron and they went down behind some sagebrush.

The car exploded in a fireball.

"We'd better keep moving," Kim whispered. "They may have seen us get out."

Kim and Ron ran at a crouch toward the outcrop, which was bigger and farther from the road than it looked.

_Dot dot dadot!_ beeped the kimmunicator in Kim's pocket.

This time they heard a whoosh of wind, and saw a five foot long finned missile land a few feet away before the deadly explosion shredded their bodies with scraps of metal.

————————————————

Kim and Ron floated in the darkness.

"That was horrible," said Ron.

"It doesn't have to happen," said Kim. "Stay focused, baby. We'll find a way. They're using the kimmunicator signal to pinpoint us somehow."

"Okay, run down what we know."

"We're in the desert, running away from someone. Which desert? Who? Do you remember?"

"I'm kind of remembering being in a glitzy hotel," said Ron.

————————————————

"_Ah, señor, y bella señora,_ welcome to the Hotel Tropica," said the smiling portly man behind the front counter in the spacious lobby. "I am Miguel Gomez. You are American, yes? Do you have reservations?"

"Ron and Kim Stoppable, Wednesday through Saturday night," said Ron.

"Regretfully I must ask to see your identification, you know, with the world the way it has become—"

"No problem," said Ron, getting out his driver's license.

————————————————

"That was our honeymoon, remember? Similar sitch, though. The drug lord's guys shot up our room, tried to gun us down on the camino, and even the cop tried to shoot us."

"We're married?"

"Sweetheart, are you drifting again?" Kim asked, her voice gradually becoming more like a little girl's voice. "Try to focus, cause you're my best friend in the whole world and I wanna be your friend forever, 'kay?"

Kim and Ron were about six, walking down Pepperidge Street hand in hand, taking turns licking a single vanilla ice cream cone.

"You always come here when you get really scared," said Kim. "But I know how to bring you back. You can finish the ice cream."

"What are you gonna do?" Ron asked, biting the bottom of the cone.

"I'm gonna hug you," said Kim, putting her arms around the boy and feeling him get bigger and stronger as her breasts swelled and her hips widened, "and kiss you," she whispered, brushing her lips across his cheek to his mouth and gently licking his lips. She wiggled her hips against his developing interest. "I'll be glad to do that too," she said, _"after_ we figure out how to survive that assassination you're remembering next week."

"Don't you remember it, too?"

"Come on over, let's look."

————————————————

"Where are we?" asked Ron.

"Heading toward the border," said Kim. "Listen to me. Ali Abdullah's guys messed with the car, which wasn't as anonymous as I'd hoped. We're losing gasoline, and I think the wires that charge the battery for the electric motor got detached."

"Shouldn't we pull over and try to fix this?" asked Ron.

"They're gonna be on our tail. They've got short range missiles keyed to the kimmunicator, and maybe a bomb in the car as well."

"Why didn't we do something about this back in town?"

"Petajar's got Central Asian Jihad guys all over. There's nowhere to hide."

"Better speed up, KS, I think I see them coming."

Rufus climbed up the backseat to look out the rear window, then scampered back to the front and sat on Ron's left shoulder. "Uh huh," he seemed to say.

"It's already too late to call for backup." Kim said, handing Ron the kimmunicator. "I can't do this and drive at the same time."

She told him which buttons to press. The kimmunicator sprouted two propellers. Rufus seemed startled and excited by the transformation.

"Roll down the window and throw it," said Kim.

Ron did so, and the kimmunicator buzzed away.

"There's the rocks," Kim said, and stomped on the brakes, laying a long patch of rubber on the road before grinding to a halt. The distant cloud of dust in the rearview mirror was gaining fast.

Ron stuffed Rufus in his pocket. "Stay there, buddy."

"Run to the rocks," said Kim.

They got out, leaped a barbed-wire fence, and scrambled toward the rocks. On impulse, Kim tackled Ron and they went down behind some sagebrush.

The car exploded in a fireball.

"We'd better keep moving," Kim whispered. "They may have seen us get out."

Kim and Ron ran at a crouch toward the rock outcrop, which was bigger and farther from the road than it looked.

The kimmunicator buzzed toward them, and beeped, _Dot dot dadot!_

With a whoosh of wind, a five foot long finned missile landed a few feet away and exploded, shredding their bodies with scraps of metal.

————————————————

Silence in the darkness.

"I'm sorry, babe," said Kim's voice. "I really thought I had it solved. Wade must've taken control of the kimmunicator and steered it to us."

"You know, the pain of being shredded by shrapnel doesn't last that long, but it's intense. How many times have we tried to change this?"

"I'll just take the battery out of the kimmunicator," said Kim.

"How about avoiding the whole sitch?" asked Ron. "What are we doing at that hotel, anyway?"

"We're looking for Ali Abdullah, who's been spotted by one of Wade's sources."

"And he's—?"

"Central Asian Jihad operative, pilot of the death plane, shot down and imprisoned by General Chao. He's either already escaped from Jao Dung Prison but we haven't heard about it yet, or he will escape soon."

"Okay, so we end the telepathy session, call General Chao to find out the score, and maybe the escape won't even happen."

"No good, Ron. I think that's how we got into this. That's right. Ali Abdullah has already escaped."

"Oh, tricky," said Ron. "How about if we wore disguises?"

"I am not wearing one of those blue burqas!"

"KS, it's a fashion with possibilities. Think of the weapons you could be packing."

Kim gasped. "Ron, I think that's what we did." Her voice sounded weak and disturbed. "Ron, I blew him away."

"You killed him?"

"With a small caliber handgun supplied by our CIA contact. Jingles was his code name. He really got me into wanting to kill Ali Abdullah. After all, this man tried to blow up a quarter of the United States with the Chixulub bomb. Yeah, it was plotted by Zafir the Scorpion or Strong Horse himself, but Abdullah's the man who almost pulled it off despite all the trouble we gave him."

————————————————

Kim followed Ron into a hotel in central Petajar, a northern city where many people had Central Asian Jihad connections. Ron's face had a week's worth of stubble dyed black with Grecian Formula, his blond hair was covered by his black turban, and his skin was darkened. Rufus was hidden in his pocket. Kim wore a headscarf under her turquoise blue burqa.

_I'm not nervous,_ Kim thought to herself. _I can do this. He deserves to die._

The man in front of Ron wore a black suit with his black turban, and carried an automatic rifle.

"Ali Abdullah, it is good to see you again, my friend," said another man with a black beard and black turban. How they recognized each other through all that facial fuzz was a mystery to Ron.

"Forget that name, friend Nasar. I have come here to disappear."

"And how many men named Ali Abdullah live in this town?" asked the man. "Many, many. The Chinese never come here."

"The Americans have a price on my head."

"Hm, hmm. There were some journalists here awhile ago. Kidnapped and beheaded, I believe. Pakistani police have so many questions, but I don't know anything. Did any Americans come here to ask questions? No, they did not. No worries, my friend, no worries."

With her right arm hidden behind Ron, Kim reached through the burqa into her pocket, pulled out the tiny handgun, and shot a bullet into the back of Ali Abdullah's head. Ron grabbed Abdullah's automatic rifle and they fled the room quickly. Rufus squirmed nervously in his pocket.

"Don't use our car," said Ron. "It's been sabotaged. Get out your skeleton key and just steal a car."

"Uh, okay," said Kim, sticking her cybertronic skeleton key into the door of a new-looking gray car. After a nervous moment while the key adapted to the lock, she got in, started the engine, opened the other door for Ron, and pulled off her burqa.

"How's the fuel?" he asked.

"Three quarters full," she said, trying to maneuver the maze of side streets without hitting any children, chickens, or goats. Finally they were on the highway, nominally paved, but the tires kicked up a cloud of dust. After awhile, another cloud of dust appeared in the distance behind them.

Rufus climbed out of Ron's pocket, ran up the backseat to look out the rear window to see what was happening, then scampered back to the front and sat on Ron's left shoulder.

Ron pulled the kimmunicator from Kim's pocket and took out the batteries. "When it beeps, a missile comes and hits us," he explained.

"Forty miles to the border, and we're home free," said Kim. "Good idea you had, stealing a car. I don't get it though. If they knew who we are and sabotaged our car, why didn't they do something to us in the hotel?"

"Okay, I'm going conspiracy theory now, but maybe they wanted Ali Abdullah killed, and wanted us killed too."

"Why would they want Abdullah dead?"

"I don't know. Maybe they think he betrayed them while he was in jail in China. Maybe he's an unworthy loser because he failed. Maybe they used him to lure us here so they can get revenge."

"You're starting to make sense," Kim said, gradually flooring the accelerator. "This thing isn't as fast as they are. They're gaining."

"Uh-oh, I just saw a flash of light."

Kim swerved to the other side of the road. A five foot long missile flew past them and exploded about a quarter mile ahead. Rufus panicked and dived into Ron's pocket. In a few seconds, they ran over the shrapnel and their tires started going flat.

"We're doomed," said Ron.

He was right. There was another flash of light. This time when Kim swerved, she lost control of the car, which left the road and tumbled sideways a couple of times before coming to rest on its crushed roof.

"I think I'm all right," said Ron. "Good thing I thought to snag this," he added, grabbing Abdullah's automatic rifle. "KS, you all right?"

Rufus screamed. Ron managed to turn his head to look at Kim's side of the car. Her neck was broken, her eyes open, blood running down one side of her pretty face.

Then the car exploded in a fireball.

————————————————

Again, silence and darkness.

"KS, you there?"

"I'm thinking."

"The only thing worse than getting killed is seeing you die first."

"I want to get us both through this mission alive. You're right. It's gotta be some kind of trap. How do they know we're bad news? Somebody must see us talking to that CIA guy."

"Or maybe the CIA guy is a double agent. Remember Chinatown Charlie?"

"So we'll leave him completely out of the mission. Let's see if we can put a marker— one of Wade's microchips, on Ali Abdullah, so Baby Bear can track him. I've got a blowgun instead of a real gun, and whoot! The microdart goes into his neck. He thinks he's been bitten by a mosquito. We walk away, muttering that the hotel's too expensive, drive back across the border, no problems."

"If the trap's not happening, will Abdullah even be there?"

"If he doesn't know about the plot, why not? Let's find out."

————————————————

Kim followed Ron into the hotel. His face had a week's worth of stubble dyed black with Grecian Formula, his blond hair was covered by his black turban, and his skin was darkened. Rufus was hidden in his pocket. Kim wore a dark headscarf under her turquoise blue burqa.

_I'm not nervous,_ Kim thought to herself. _I can do this._

The man in front of Ron wore a black suit with his black turban, and carried an automatic rifle.

"Old friend, it is good to see you again," said another man with a black beard and black turban.

"I must disappear for awhile."

"I know, my friend. You are always welcome here."

"I thank you for that."

With her right arm hidden behind Ron, Kim reached through the burqa into her pocket, pulled out the tiny blowgun, and the microdart hit the back of Ali Abdullah's right ear, injecting the microchip.

It took him a moment to react, to swat at his ear. He saw a little bit of blood on his finger.

"Too expensive," Ron muttered. "Let's go."

They walked out of the hotel to their white Hyundai. "I'm driving," whispered Ron, unlocking the passenger door for Kim.

He started the car and rolled down the main street toward the edge of town, slowing down for children and chickens. Rufus started to get out of Ron's pocket but Ron pushed him back in. "Stay there, buddy— and you keep the burqa on, woman. Stay in character. This town is a total vipers' nest."

"I think it's working this way," Kim said. "No name dropping, probably no trap."

Ron drove past the sagebrush and rock outcrops, the barren ground with no cover, and climbed toward the mountain pass. They reached the border without incident.

————————————————

The lights came on and Dr. Avrum Hurlbetter, a psychology professor at Northwestern State University, walked into the room where Kim sat on a reclining chair with the telepathy helmet on her head. She pulled her kimmunicator out of her pocket, pressed a few buttons, and began typing on the screen keyboard.

"What are you doing?" asked Dr. Hurlbetter.

"Shush. I'll talk to you in a moment. This is life and death, and classified. Let me note what's important before I forget."

"But—"

Kim gave him the Kim glare. There was no arguing with the Kim glare.

When she finally stopped typing, he asked, "Can you tell me anything about your experience?"

"Memories of our future again, a mission that hasn't happened yet," Kim replied. "We got killed. We kept changing things till we found a way to do it without getting killed. At least, I think so. We made it to the border with nobody following us."

"So the future you remember can be changed?"

"Obviously, if we can remember both growing old together and dying on a mission next week. Something's changed to make this a real concern. An enemy just pulled off an improbable escape from prison, and that sets up real trouble for me."

Ron popped into the room, with Rufus on his shoulder and Belinda Brockmeyer behind him.

"They need to debrief this mission first," Belinda said. "I'm afraid this session won't be much use for your research."

"Yeah, Kim and I gotta talk in private, make sure we remember every detail. You got a great machine here."

"On the contrary, Belinda," Dr Hurlbetter said as they walked out of the room. "This is Nobel Prize stuff, if there's any way to reproduce the results with other subjects, and if—"

"If the government doesn't slap a Z-12 on this machine," Kim muttered after the professor and Belinda were out of hearing range. "I hope we are the only people who can use it this way."

"Let's run down the plan," said Ron. "The way I see it, we want no contact with Jingles, and can't do anything that tells the black hats we're the enemy."

————————————————

_Dot dot dadot!_

Kim picked up the kimmunicator and turned it on. Ron sat in the upholstered swivel chair reading a history book and taking notes while she lounged on the bed and Rufus dozed in his nest box. They were in their dorm room on the third floor of Mathom House at Northwestern State University. Ron had a few day's growth of blond stubble on his face.

"Wade, run the security updater to change the protocol on my kimmunicator. We've got a bad security breach. Don't try to trace the hack. These are serious geeks."

"Uh, okay," said Wade, and his face was replaced by a series of random color flashes and moving progress bars.

"That's a good idea," said Ron, giving Kim a smile before turning back to his book.

After a couple of minutes, Wade's face reappeared.

"I'm guessing you want to talk about Ali Abdullah escaping from Jao Dung prison," said Kim.

"You know about that?" Wade asked. "I have an update from a CIA operative in Islamabad, code named Jingles. Abdullah is staying in Petajar."

"A viper's nest of terrorists," said Kim. "It's a trap. This Jingles is either a double agent or he's being watched and used. I don't want to meet with him, and don't want him to know if I come after Abdullah at all. I'm not sure whether the Jihad geeks can decode the kimmunicator signal, but they're going to try to use it to guide a missile to my car. We'll be in disguise. They're planning to let me kill Abdullah. They'll sabotage my getaway car and hit me with missiles when I run out of gas."

"You're one up on me this time," said Wade. "I tried to tell Jingles you're no assassin, but he thought he could persuade you."

"He's probably one of them," said Kim. "Those guys kill themselves to make hits. They don't understand me at all."

"What are you planning?"

"I can't go into Petajar with a big enough force to capture Abdullah. The best I can do is mark him with a microchip, and hope he doesn't deactivate it."

"My microchips aren't that easy to deactivate," said Wade.

"How many did Drakken deactivate?" asked Kim.

Wade chuckled. "Point conceded. But Drakken's a nanoengineer, and I've improved the shielding since then. The easiest delivery system is probably a little blowgun about the size and shape of an eyedropper that fires a microdart."

"That's exactly what I have in mind."

"You'll have to be pretty close to him."

"At 11:30, Saturday morning, I'll be about six feet behind him."

"That'll work. You've really got this planned. How did you learn all this?"

"I'll tell you when Abdullah's back in custody."

————————————————

"The more I think about this, the weirder it is," Kim told Ron. "We learned about this plot against us from a man we never met, and from experiences we're not going to have."

"It's just like a video game," said Ron. "If you get killed, you reload your saved game and try again, knowing what doesn't work."

"Yeah, a simulation, but doesn't that violate causality somehow?"

"You can't outrun the speed of light, Kim. How do you know where to put your mirror to bounce the laser? How do you know when bullets are gonna fly through the door? This isn't so different, just less immediate."

"That's almost instinctive. I've spent way too much time thinking about this one. I remember what Jingles looks like, the sound of his voice, the phrasing of his arguments. I hope we never do meet. He could actually talk me into an assassination."

"Ali Abdullah wanted to blow a hole in the eastern United States so big that the side effects could have killed billions all over the world," said Ron. "If you can be talked into killing anyone at all—"

"Don't get me into it," said Kim. "That's the problem. He so deserves to die, but that doesn't mean I want to kill him. Well, if the only way I could stop Abdullah from taking all those lives is to kill him, I'm okay with that. But that's not what's happening now."

"Yeah, I understand that."

"If we're using the mental powers of prophets or shamans, enhanced to total accuracy—"

"We've gotta be, like, extremely moral." Ron said, looking into Kim's eyes.

"Yeah."

————————————————

Kim followed Ron into the hotel. His face had a week's worth of stubble dyed black with Grecian Formula, his blond hair was covered by his black turban, and his skin was darkened. Rufus was hidden in his pocket. Kim wore a dark headscarf under her turquoise blue burqa.

_I'm not nervous,_ Kim thought to herself. _I know exactly what to do._

The man in front of Ron wore a black suit with his black turban, and carried an automatic rifle.

"Old friend, it is good to see you again," said another man with a black beard and black turban.

"I must disappear for awhile."

"I know, my friend. You are always welcome here."

"I thank you for that."

With her right arm hidden behind Ron, Kim reached through the burqa into her pocket, pulled out the tiny blowgun, and the microdart hit the back of Ali Abdullah's right ear, injecting the microchip.

It took him a moment to react, to swat at his ear. He saw a little bit of blood on his finger.

"Too expensive," Ron muttered. "Let's go."

They walked out of the hotel to their white Hyundai. Ron unlocked the passenger door for Kim. He started the car and rolled down the main street toward the edge of town, slowing down for children and chickens. "We did it," he said. Rufus tried to leave his pocket, but Ron pushed him back in, saying, "Stay there, buddy."

"Smooth as silk," said Kim, making no move to take off her burqa. "I like being able to rehearse."

Ron drove past the sagebrush and rock outcrops, the barren ground with no cover, and climbed toward the mountain pass. They reached the border without incident.

The American soldiers maintaining a checkpoint took them into custody. Soon they were in the back of the troop carrier, removing their disguises. "I think I got pictures," said Ron, looking dubiously at his turban clip.

————————————————

Kim and Ron sat in General "Baby Bear" Branson's office. Kim and Rufus looked normal. Ron's skin still looked tanned despite repeated scrubbing, but his face was clean shaven.

"Just checked with Dog Chow," Branson said. "Showed him your pix. He's sure you tagged the right guy. We got him tracked."

"Don't trust Jingles, or the Petajar cops," said Kim. "They'll just tell Abdullah he's been chipped and he'll get it deactivated."

"What do you know about Jingles?"

"At best, he's been compromised. The black hats are at least watching and using him, and he could actually be one of them."

"What makes you think this?"

Kim shook her head. "I can't explain that. It's—"

"Mystical kung-fu simulation," said Ron.

"Like the Ghost?" asked Baby Bear, referring to Yori.

"Yes, exactly," said Kim.

"I hate to say it, but the CIA bungles more often than they succeed. They'll stubbornly cling to a lame operative and pull a good one. But they can do stuff on that side of the border and I can't. So you're saying, unless Jingles gets pulled from the loop, just wait till Abdullah goes somewhere else. I suppose I could pick him off with a mini-cruise, but the locals hate that and I'll catch hell."

————————————————

A small black jet with "KP" monogrammed on the tail flew over the Pacific Ocean toward America. Felix Renton sat at the controls, his cyber-robotic wheelchair locked in place. Kim and Ron were unfolding the bed in the back of the plane. Rufus was curled up in his nest box.

"Well, we did it," said Ron. "We tagged Ali Abdullah and got away alive."

"Yeah, I wish we could have done more," Kim said. "But to actually snatch Abdullah from a city like Petajar, we'd need—"

"—a wide aerial spray of antiexplosive foam, and a big squad," said Ron. "And even then, they'd have all kinds of munitions sealed in bunkers and basements."

"It's politically impossible," Kim said. "Petajar's too close to the provincial and national capitals. Even on a moonless night— I can't see it."

"Everything would have to go exactly right," said Felix. "I understand you rehearsed or simulated this mission on the telepathy machine."

"Belinda talked to you about that?" Kim asked with an edge in her voice.

"Well, yeah. I'm on your team, right? I'm your pilot. She wouldn't tell anyone else."

"We haven't even told Wade yet," said Kim.

"You'd tell him if tapping the kimmunicator signal wasn't part of the plot against you."

"What scares me is the idea that my enemies could get a machine like this and rehearse an assassination. The fewer people who even have the idea that this kind of simulation is possible, the better, as far as I'm concerned."

"I understand. You know, I think It's not so much Ali Abdullah you need to worry about as the other guys in Petajar who consider him expendable."

"So true, Felix," said Kim. "A Global Justice spy tick on Ali would've told us a lot more, but he's used those himself."

"Do you know how many times we got killed trying to find a way to accomplish _anything_ on this mission and survive?" asked Ron. "It _hurts._ It _does_ something to me, makes me want to kill them back, and I _don't_ want to go there."

"Yeah, I want to use the next telepathy session to just comfort and heal each other," said Kim.

"I guess I don't know what it's like to use that machine," said Felix.

"It's intense," Kim said, frowning. "I don't think it'd be possible to rehearse a mission with a big squad. There's too many variables. The key moments in this mission were simple."

"I wonder if Strong Horse is in Petajar," said Felix.

"Doubt it," said Ron. "He's tall as a basketball player, and one of the most famous faces in the world. Even in Petajar, someone unfriendly to his cause would spot him."

"I don't like the thought that Strong Horse could be taking personal interest in me," said Kim. "How did Ali Abdullah's escape from Jao Dung set this trap in motion? Abdullah could have seen me at the caves of Zafir the Scorpion, when he and his partner got away with the plane. The Petajar guys might know Zafir's been captured, if not by whom. Putting it together, yeah, they might wanna kill Kim Possible."

"At least they tried to lure us to their turf to get us," said Ron.

"This time," said Kim. "But it's not so hard to find out where we are. If people like Wanda Hu Khan can break into Wade's lab, how secure are the secret defenses of Mathom House? Wade designed both systems."

"There's the telepathy machine," said Ron. "If there's immanent danger, we'll remember it."

"That's not our equipment. We can't just use it anytime we want."

"We could ask."

"How much do you think we can take Avrum Hurlbetter into our confidence?" Kim asked. "I like him. His machine's a very powerful tool for us."

"Get Wade to do a background check," suggested Felix.

"Ron?" Kim asked.

"You're the one who spends time with Dr. Hurlbetter. I'm talking to Belinda, you know, and I'm— okay, Belinda's manner seems kinda spooky and her big dark eyes are a little scary, but I'm understanding her better, Ithink. What Kim and I do with the machine, Belinda kinda does with everyone she gets close to, whether she wants to or not."

"Yeah," said Felix. "Sometimes she'll talk to me about some experience she thinks she had with me in medieval Ireland or ancient China, and it's almost like I'm there with her, seeing what she's describing."

"You're in love, aren't you?" asked Kim.

"Absolutely," said Felix.

"Maybe the four of us should get together more often," said Kim. "I've gotta agree with Ron. The experiences Ron and I shared on the machine make me feel more, well, interested in Belinda's point of view. Not that I necessarily believe I was ever a priestess of Athena, you understand."

"Hey, you'd look great in one of those ancient Greek dresses," said Ron.

"You're sweet," said Kim, giving Ron her Mona Lisa smile and pulling the curtain closed between the cockpit and the bed.

* * *

_Concluded in Mind Out Of Time, Part 3: Accelerator._


	3. Accelerator

**Mind Out Of Time**

**Part 3:**

**Accelerator**

_Kim Possible, Ron Stoppable, Rufus, Wade Load, Monique, and Felix Renton are characters from the Kim Possible show, created by Mark McCorkle and Bob Schooley, owned and copyright © by the Walt Disney Company. The story takes place in May of Kim and Ron's sophomore year of college, three years after "So the Drama," and shortly after "Mind Out Of Time, Part 2: Dress Rehearsal." This story © 2006 by cloudmonet. This concludes a three part story._

* * *

Wearing a Earth Eco Action T-shirt and a flowered bikini bottom made at Jao Dung Prison, a young Melanesian woman frowned at her companion. "She won't come," she said in her native dialect, a language with fewer than three hundred living speakers.

He looked up from his laptop computer at her pretty face, decorated with a lacelike pattern of bumps. They were sitting in one of the few internet cafes in the Malaysian part of Borneo. Most of the other customers were tourists in holiday clothes, or bearded terrorists wearing jungle cammo.

A young brown-skinned woman with wavy black hair and bright brown eyes walked in off the street. She wore a flowered blouse tied to expose her midriff with tan shorts and leather sandals. She walked around the tables, as if looking for someone, and moved directly toward the young Borneo couple.

"Hey, sister," she said in English to the young woman. "Are you Limau— and Wikiwaki?"

The young man smiled. "I'm Wikiwaki," he said.

Limau took her clue from him and smiled shyly. "I— Limau," she said, tapping her chest.

"I'm Monique," said the woman in the flowered blouse. "Is the food any good here? Have you eaten already? I'm kinda hungry and something smells good. You want me to buy you lunch?"

"You are most kind, Monique," Wikiwaki replied.

"No big."

"Do you think she knows her?" Limau asked Wikiwaki in their own language.

"How else would a rich tourist woman know our names?"

Monique was waving at the waitress, who came to the table but glanced at Wikiwaki and Limau with distaste. "Can you speak English?" Monique asked her.

"Lidda bit. You wanna curry chao, ped mao, swang hao, wott nao?" This wasn't exactly what she really said, but she spoke so quickly that Monique couldn't understand any better.

"Whoa, slow down. What's the rice, mushroom, tofu, and pepper those guys are having?" She pointed at a table of possible terrorists.

"Oh, dat bomm pao," the waitress said. "You likey dat?"

"Bomb pow? Yeah, three plates of that." She raised three fingers. After the waitress hustled away, Monique remarked, "That's a good bilingual pun, those guys eating bomb pow of all things."

The bearded men looked at her darkly.

"What?" Monique said with a smile. "You're army guys, aren't you?"

"Army guys, yeah," one of them said, forcing a smile.

"So you shoot, _bam! pow!_ like the name of your food, right?"

Both men shrugged and ignored her after that.

"What you doing?" Limau asked with an urgent hush. "Those guys bad."

"Yeah, I bet they're baaaad," Monique said, then whispered, "Definitely terrorists who know English. Yeah, I'm just a dumb tourist chick lusting after local army guys. Don't know nothing 'bout what Kim and Ron are doin'. Do you think that dude's hot?"

"So not," said Limau.

"Sister, you know I'm faking, right?" Monique whispered. "I'll get real when we're more private."

"They just privates, plain soldiers," said Limau. "You wanna officer."

"Yeah," Monique replied.

Wikiwaki was typing something on his laptop keyboard.

The waitress came, carrying three plates of rice, tofu, mushrooms, and pepper. Monique flashed a credit card, which the waitress pressed into an old-fashioned carbon-paper receipt. She gave Monique back her card and the yellow copy.

————————————————

Kim and Ron walked across the clearing on top of the mountain toward Dr. Mekong, a slight bald man in a gray lab coat with a wispy goatee. His henchmen had black turbans and thick beards.

"I understand you have come to inspect our facility, Kim Possible," the scientist said, shaking her hand. "Surely your contacts in the government have assured you that our work is entirely— up and up, would you say?"

"First of all, a high mountain in Borneo is a strange place for a particle accelerator."

"An excellent location actually, with the hydroelectric and solar opportunities."

"Hmm, yes. I didn't see any dams or solar panels in the satellite imagery," said Kim.

"All in the future," said Dr. Mekong. "For now, we're running off an Unron 200 Megawatt Cold Fusion Reactor."

"The fashion sense of your henchmen is a bit suspicious," said Ron.

"Many in Malaysia are devout Muslims," said Dr. Mekong. "You can't accuse someone of being a terrorist simply for growing a full beard or wearing a black turban."

"A few months ago, did you have employees named Ho Zhomp and Khi Myong?"

"I know everyone who's working here now, but I wasn't here during the site preparation and construction phases."

"Are you aware that two terrorists from Central Asian Jihad landed a stolen hoverjet here in January and picked up a crew for a mission to China?" asked Kim. "Ho and Khi were among the people who went with them."

"Don't even try it, dude," said Ron.

Kim knew exactly which one he meant and hit his wrist with a spinning kick, causing the handgun he was drawing to spin through the air to Ron's hands. Kim punched the man to the ground, kicked another one who made a move she didn't like, and flipped a third.

Ron fired a shot and shouted, "I want everybody, 'cept Kim of course, down on the ground, on your bellies, hands over your head and no movin', _NOW!" _He was holding the gun as if he knew how to use it and glaring with his best serious face.

Kim gave Ron a huge smile, then, businesslike, frisked the henchmen, collecting a couple of other handguns and some sharp knives. "Well, Dr. Mekong, did you really think you could take me prisoner or shoot me?"

"This is all a misunderstanding," he replied, his voice thin and pleading.

"I don't think so," said Kim, pointing her kimmunicator at one of the bearded henchmen. It beeped. She walked over and nudged him with her foot. "Yeah, that's you. Roll over. Let me see your face, Ali Abdullah."

He didn't move till she kicked him really hard.

"What kind of man are you, Ali Abdullah?" Kim asked, staring into his dark brown eyes. "You think you're trying to do something good, but killing millions of people can't be good, no matter who they are and no matter what your grievance is against them. Stopping you was probably the best thing I've done in my life, and here you are, what, trying to make your own encapsulated antimatter with this particle accelerator? I wouldn't advise it. You'll just blow a crater in this mountain if you don't know what you're doing, and I doubt that any of you do. But there's indigenous people here, some rare birds and primates, and a nice rain forest which I really don't want blown up."

A well-aimed sniper bullet went through Kim's head.

Ron turned and fired a clip of bullets at what he thought was the sniper's location in the trees.

————————————————

"Kim, you're not really dead," said Ron.

"No, I'm not," she replied.

He opened his eyes to the inside of Kim's black jet, where he and Kim were lying side by side in the foldout bed, with telepathy helmets connected to the new portable interface unit. While connected to each other this way in Dr. Hurlbetter's lab, Kim and Ron discovered they could relive shared experiences from the past or the future, a future that could then be altered if necessary.

"That still didn't go well, did it?" Belinda asked. "Do you want to try again?"

Belinda Brockmeyer was Felix Renton's girlfriend, and Dr. Hurlbetter's undergraduate assistant. She knew how to run the equipment.

Kim sat up. "Maybe. Let's run down what we've learned. There's no doubt Dr. Mekong is in league with the terrorists. He wasn't at all surprised when Ali Abdullah tried to kill me. His henchmen are mostly Malaysian, but they dress like Central Asian Jihad guys."

"We should do this mission as a straight bust," said Ron. "And no rants against evil till everyone's accounted for."

Rufus, Ron's pet naked mole rat, scampered onto Ron's shoulder as soon as he heard his voice.

"Hey, little buddy," Ron said, stroking his pink skin.

"Sorry," said Kim. "The rant was just to draw them out. I wouldn't do it for the real sitch. Trouble is, we need to _prove_ Dr. Mekong is up to no good. He's got connections in the provincial and national governments who are not doing background checks on his employees, and not looking into his intentions. I was able to pressure other officials into letting us inspect."

"Isn't finding Ali Abdullah working there proof enough?" asked Felix. "The way I see it, we should just saturate the site with antiexplosive foam."

"No good," said Kim. "Mekong said they're running off an Unron cold-fusion reactor, probably Drakken's design. If antiexplosive foam gets into the reactor's air vents, there's a real nasty chemical reaction, and the cold fusion reaction could heat up. We so don't want that happening if we're anywhere nearby!"

"Ouch!" said Felix.

————————————————

Monique opened the passenger door of her rental car, a white Suburu, and flipped the seat forward. After hesitating, both Wikiwaki and Limau got into the back seat.

"Oh, you want to sit together?" Monique asked. "That's okay." She walked around around and got in the driver's seat.

"Are you taking us to Kim Possible?" asked Wikiwaki.

"That internet cafe was full of _them,_" said Monique. "Kim doesn't want them to see you guys with her."

"They're already shooting at us," said Limau.

"Yeah, well, they don't like you guys, and they know Kim's out to get them, but if they don't know we're working together, we can make better surprises."

"What's the plan?" asked Wikiwaki.

"I'm not sure," said Monique. "Kim and Ron are still holed up in their jet, on the plantation airstrip, working it out with Felix and Belinda."

————————————————

The bubbling cold fusion reactor cast a greenish light in the underground room. To one side was the curved housing of the particle accelerator, and at the other end of the room, the target, where Dr. Mekong hoped to replicate Wade Load's process for encapsulating antimatter.

"As you can see, friend Abdullah, there's nothing to worry about. I can explain the function of everything here as pure research in particle physics. The equipment specific to encapsulating antimatter is no bigger than a hard drive, and believe me, it's hidden where she'll never find it."

"This isn't some bureaucrat half-sympathetic to the cause," Abdullah replied. "This is Kim Possible. She's relentless, and—"

"You worry too much," said Dr. Mekong. "When you landed the Global Justice plane here on your way to China, I was not in charge. There was no one here but construction crew, grunts, sympathetic to the jihad. We are scientists and technicians, dedicated to bringing employment and prosperity to an otherwise backwards region."

"You think she's a fool. She's clever and dangerous. Either we take her out, or get a one way ride to the American Gulag."

"So the rumor is true," said Khi Myong, who had been Ali Abdullah's cellmate in Jao Dung Prison. "Kim Possible is coming—"

"To inspect the facility, to make sure the terrorists are no longer in charge," Dr. Mekong said with a chuckle. "Many Malaysians are devout Muslims. You cannot accuse someone of being a terrorist just because he wears a full beard and a black turban. I'm a respected particle physicist. I wouldn't hire terrorists."

"Yeah, right," said Ali Abdullah.

Dr. Mekong waved a technical journal. "I'll show her my papers."

"Her technical staff has probably run a style comparison of your signed technical articles and your weapons-making instructions on our website," said Abdullah.

"You really think she's that good?"

"There was another prisoner, a big fat Japanese man called Sumo Ninja. He's crossed paths with Kim Possible repeatedly, and considers it no dishonor to be foiled by her. What I realize now is that I myself was foiled by her. She told the Chinese how to penetrate the plane's invisibility. She was that red-haired commando leading the assault on our base in the Hindu Kush. She must know that I landed here and got a new crew. This is no inspection, friend Mekong. This is a raid."

"What do you propose, friend Abdullah?"

"Let's keep it simple. I'll just shoot her while her attention's on you."

"That's an act with dire consequences for this facility. Her death would shut us down."

"Consider the big picture, my friend. Her death would advance our cause."

————————————————

"And there's your evidence, with translation," Wade said proudly, "taped off their own security camera."

"You rock, as always," said Kim.

"Unfortunately, this is the only camera actually inside the lab. I guess they want to keep an eye on that cold fusion reactor."

"Too bad he didn't say where the antimatter encapsulating stuff was."

Wade grinned. "Well, if they copied my plan, which I doubt they completely understood, it includes a nanochip beacon you can tune into with the kimmunicator."

Kim smiled.

"We've still got to make the bust ourselves, right?" asked Ron.

"This might be good enough for the central government or Global Justice, but I'd like to avoid a shootout if possible. To use antiexplosive foam safely, someone has to shut down the cold fusion reactor and seal its air vents."

"Sounds like a job for Mrs. and Mr. Stoppable. So how are we going to do this?"

————————————————

Kim and Ron walked across the clearing on top of the mountain toward Dr. Mekong, a slight bald man in a gray lab coat with a wispy goatee. His henchmen had black turbans and thick beards.

"I understand you have come to inspect our facility, Kim Possible," the scientist said, shaking her hand. "Surely your contacts in the government have assured you that our work is entirely— up and up, would you say?"

"Of course, Dr. Mekong," Kim replied. "But a high mountain in Borneo is an unusual place to build a particle accelerator. My concern is possible damage to the environment. This jungle is habitat for a number of endangered primates and birds, as well as the home territory of several indigenous tribes."

Dr. Mekong looked puzzled, and made a curious gesture. Two of his henchmen scowled darkly.

"Our power source is very clean and efficient, a state of the art Unron 200 Megawatt cold fusion reactor which we plan to augment eventually with a solar power installation."

"And, perhaps, also a hydroelectric dam?" Kim asked.

Across the clearing, in the jungle, something went thump, a sniper knocked down by a tribesman jumping from a tree.

"Don't even try it, dude," said Ron.

Kim knew exactly which henchman he meant and hit his wrist with a spinning kick, causing the handgun he was drawing to spin through the air to Ron's hands. Kim punched the man to the ground, kicked another one who made a move she didn't like, and flipped a third.

Ron fired a shot into the air and shouted, "I want everybody, 'cept Kim of course, down on the ground, on your bellies, hands over your head and no movin', _NOW!" _He was holding the gun as if he knew how to use it and glaring with his best serious face.

Kim gave Ron a huge smile, then, businesslike, frisked the henchmen, collecting a couple of other handguns and some sharp knives, which she put in her backpack. Then Ron threw down a ninja smoke pellet, and ran with Kim through the front door.

————————————————

Kim and Ron put on their infrared goggles. Kim reached into her pocket and pulled out a plug without a cord. "This should blow the circuit breaker and keep it blown," she whispered, sticking the plug into the electrical outlet. The corridor went dark. An alarm sounded. Kim and Ron heard footsteps running, and darted into a bathroom. Rufus They could see flashlights through the crack around the door.

They came out a few steps behind the two men. Kim leapt and spun through the air to kick her man in the head. Ron downed his with a tackle from behind. The flashlight struck the floor and came apart, spilling its batteries. The gun, fortunately, was also knocked out of his hands and out of reach. However, this man was a tangle of angry muscle who almost got the better of Ron a couple of times, till Rufus, Ron's pet molerat and secret weapon, bit his hands and face, and Ron slammed his head against the concrete floor.

————————————————

Meanwhile, Dr. Mekong, Ali Abdullah, and the others outside, already disarmed by Kim and Ron, found themselves surrounded by about fifty angry jungle men with long spears, their faces and bodies painted with black and white patterns.

"I don't think you're gonna shoot at us anymore," said Wikiwaki, thrusting his spear toward one of the Malay men. "We takin' you prisoner for Kim and she takin' you outta here forever."

In a very businesslike way, the men of three local clans began locking handcuffs on their captives' wrists.

————————————————

Kim and Ron ran down the fire stairs and into a corridor that was still lit. Kim found an outlet, plugged in another circuit-blowing device, and this corridor went dark. The alarm continued beeping. With their infrared goggles, Kim and Ron saw a man attempting to feel his way, and quickly overpowered him and bound him with the cloth of his turban.

"At least they don't all have flashlights handy," she said, as she searched him for weapons.

Then Kim and Ron came to the main lab, and cautiously cracked open the door and peered in. Two technicians were at a bank of circuit breakers with a flashlight, trying to restore the power. One on them said something in Arabic. Kim opened the door a little wider. The ghoulish green glow of the bubbling cold fusion reactor wasn't much brighter in infrared.

Kim and Ron slipped into the room, moving behind tables and banks of equipment to the reactor control panel. The on-off switch was locked by a key, but no problem for Kim, who stuck her cybertronic skeleton key into the lock, waited a few tense moments for the key to adapt to the correct configuration, switched it off, put the key back in her pocket, and moved quickly toward the two technicians. The green glow faded. The alarm stopped.

Ron snatched the flashlight from the man holding it and threw it across the room. The fight was fast and decisive, but one of the technicians managed to break Ron's infrared goggles before being subdued.

"It's all right, Ron, I brought spare goggles," Kim said, going through all the confiscated handguns in her backpack to find them.

Kim fired her grappling hook gun at some pipes on the ceiling and swung to the top of the cold fusion reactor, where she examined the air hoses coupled to a fan housing on the ceiling. "This is it," she said. "I just need a big pipe wrench."

"These guys don't have any weapons on them," Ron informed her, and went over to a red metal tool cabinet and started looking through drawers. He found a pipe wrench that was about thirty inches long and probably weighed thirty pounds. "How 'bout this?"

Kim swung back down to the floor and joined Ron at the tool drawers. "I might want that if it's stuck hard, but probably a smaller one will do fine." With two wrenches in hand, she winched herself back up to the top of the reactor, and disconnected the hoses from the fan housing and reconnected them to each other. "Done," she said. "Let's get out of here."

"I'm ready for that," said Ron, pulling two paintball guns loaded with antiexplosive foam reagents from his backpack and giving one to Kim.

They moved cautiously back to the door, the corridor, the stairway. There was a man ahead of them, blind in the darkness, attempting to feel his way up.

Taking two steps at a time in rhythm with his steps, Kim and Ron climbed closer. Ron fired a paintball at the underside of the stairs above the man, who was engulfed by what looked like glowing bubbles in the infrared goggles. Quickly the foam collapsed. He was choking, sputtering, and slipping on the steps. Kim and Ron carefully stepped past him and continued to the corridor at the surface level and out.

————————————————

The men of all three local clans were grinning, looking like they were having a good time. Dr. Mekong, Ali Abdullah, the nine men who had been with them, and the two snipers caught in the jungle, were sitting on the ground, their hands cuffed behind their backs.

"We got them all out here," old chief Kibakauwa told Kim. "How many more inside?"

"At least six. Two of them were armed."

Felix was sitting in his cyber-robotic wheelchair, with sprayer tanks attached to the seat back. "I'm all ready," he said.

"The reactor's shut down and sealed," said Kim. "Go for it."

One of the cyber-robotic tentacles opened the door, the other one fed a double pressure hose inside. Felix pressed a button to activate the pump.

"Whoa, dude, that's plenty," said Ron.

Kim and Ron leaned against the door as blue foam fizzed through the crack like an erupting soda. After about half a minute, the pressure subsided.

First they brought out the two men by the upstairs bathroom, then the man on the stairs, the man in the downstairs corridor, the two techs in the lab. Then they searched the facility for others, finding five more, all of whom immediately surrendered.

Kim then searched for the antimatter encapsulating equipment by the nanochip beacon. It was hidden in a plastic bag inside a box of laundry soap in a cleaning supply cupboard.

"Naughty, naughty, Dr. Mekong, building a particle accelerator to make encapsulated antimatter bombs," Kim said with a smile, showing him the incriminating device. "And you, Ali Abdullah, you're the guy who actually wants to _use_ an encapsulated antimatter bomb, a dragonslayer bomb, a Chixulub bomb. What kind of man are you, anyway? Do you want to wipe out America, the human species, or life on Earth? Well, okay, I'm sure there'll still be rats and cockroaches. I know you don't care about Americans or Europeans, but have you thought about what the tsunami your bomb would cause will do to the coasts of Arabia, the lowlands of Iraq, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia?"

Some of the bearded captives looked angrily at Ali Abdullah.

"The infidel woman lies!" he cried out.

"Lies?" asked Kim, looking at them all. "Think for yourselves! What do you think would happen if you blew a three hundred mile hole, a hundred miles deep, in Chesapeake Bay? Won't that make a big splash in the Atlantic Ocean, one so big it'll bounce all over the world?"

"No bomb could be that big," said Abdullah.

"Dude, it's antimatter," said Ron. "E equals M C squared, and we're not talking a tiny percentage like a hydrogen bomb. All the mass goes boom. How big a crater you wanna blow? You can probably do it."

"Boom!" squeaked Rufus, spreading his front paws.

"Is he right?" Abdullah asked Mekong.

"In theory, perhaps, though heating so large an encapsulation evenly and quickly enough to get a total explosion would take some engineering. This was never my objective. The strength of a hydrogen bomb small enough to be carried in a martyr's pocket, a few of these would destroy America without hurting anything else."

Kim rolled her eyes and shook her head. "So not gonna happen. Felix, how's your power?"

"At least twice what I need to get to Lake Tumakoi."

"Good. Bring the plane."

Felix worked the controls on the arm of his wheelchair, the wheels flipped up, the hover jets fired, and he rose into the air and moved away.

Kim pulled her kimmunicator out and called Wade. "Technical question," she said. "I have 22 terrorists in Borneo I need to get to American custody ASAP. How many can I pack in my jet at once?"

"I'd prioritize and make two trips," said Wade. "Wanna see if Baby Bear can arrange anything? There's an American airbase in the Philippines."

"Sure, see if you can get me Baby Bear."

Kim put the kimmunicator back in her pocket and it immediately beeped, _Dot dot dadot!_ She pressed the button and there was General "Baby Bear" Branson.

"Knockout! Hear you picked up some black hats."

"I got Ali Abdullah, and I got his new boss, Dr. Mekong."

"The Nobel prize nominee?"

"Didn't know about that," said Kim. "But did you know he's the one who wrote the internet articles about encapsulated—"

"Whoa," said Branson. "Just call it Z-12 how-to."

"Well, instead of stealing it, Mekong was gonna use this particle accelerator to make his own Z-12, _small enough to be carried in a martyr's pocket,_ to use his own phrase."

"A particle accelerator in Borneo? We thought that was just a black hat fitness camp. Let the diplomats sort out what to do about this after we collect the black hats. How many all together?"

"Twenty two. Got them all alive and for the most part in good condition."

"You need help hauling?"

"Would be nice. Can you do it?"

"Not officially. I'll have someone meet you in about 45 minutes."

————————————————

About half an hour later, Kim's plane landed at the airstrip. Felix popped the cockpit, and rose straight into the air on his chair's jets and settled down in front of Kim and Ron. "You want to start loading them up?" he asked them.

"Carrier jets should be here in fifteen," Kim replied. "See what they want to do."

"This is what you want to see," Monique told Belinda as they stepped onto the grass, "bad guys cuffed, good guys smiling and gossiping 'bout the bust, no overlooked details. Getting involved with Kim's missions can get really scary."

"What did you do?" Belinda asked.

"Looks like I arranged for all these Borneo guys to show up. There's Wikiwaki, and Kibakauwa. Don't see Limau, or any of the women, actually. Guess they stayed home."

Belinda looked around at the native warriors, wearing feathers, paint, and pointy gourds. "It's like a dream from another time," she said.

Kim turned to them. "Hey, Monique, Belinda," she said. "Thanks so much for all your help. I couldn't have pulled this one off without you."

"Hey, it was fine," Monique replied. "Limau and Wiki were kinda fun, and the food wasn't half bad."

"You ate the food?" Ron asked with shock.

Rufus scowled, stuck out his tongue, and said, "Yuck!"

"It was rice, tofu, mushrooms, and pepper sauce. What's wrong with that?"

"Oh, well, that doesn't sound too bad, at least with a little diablo sauce. You sure there weren't any beetle grubs?"

————————————————

Before long, a couple of carrier jets unofficially landed beside Kim's jet on the airstrip and off-the-record personnel took away all 22 captives. "We'll put 'em up in the luxury suites, Ma'am," Lieutenant What's-his-name told Kim.

"Couple of these guys broke out of the luxury suites in China," she replied. "And we don't want that happening again."

"How'd they do that?"

"Don't know," said Kim.

Ali Abdullah smiled at her, a smile more menacing than any frown, but didn't say anything.

————————————————

"Now we want to know, what happens to this house?" Chief Kibakauwa asked Kim, pointing to the accelerator facility. "As long as it's here, some strangers will use it."

"You're right," said Kim. "But I don't want to detonate the cold fusion reactor— that'd blow off the whole mountain top."

"Get creative," said Ron. "Infect the computers with viruses, switch the wires around, leave the doors open and let the bats and monkeys come in."

Kim smiled at her husband. "Hmm." She pressed a button on the kimmunicator. "Wade, I want to sabotage this facility so it's not obviously sabotaged, can't easily be repaired, but won't just blow up in a fireball of nasty fumes and molten metal."

"Sure. Here's what you need to do—"

————————————————

Back at Northwestern State University, Kim and Ron were talking to Dr. Hurlbetter and Belinda in his office.

"The new adjustments helped, but the real secret to using it the way you originally wanted to use it is learning how to use it," said Kim. "When we first started, our minds wandered back and forth through a lifetime of shared experiences. We couldn't tell where we really were in time, or what was real. But if Ron and I know what we want to do with the machine, we can do it now, and know the difference between simulation and the real thing."

"At least after we come out," said Ron.

"What we can't do is become complacent. This time we just used the machine to find who our enemies were and what their basic plan was. Then I just did what I would've done if I'd got the same info from Wade."

"Kim and I figure, even if we run a sim for a daring plan and it works perfectly, something could change, and it might not work so well in real life."

"But you are gathering true information from potential experiences," said Dr. Hurlbetter.

"What we've done is awakened Kim's and Ron's psychic and prophetic abilities," said Belinda. "These are abilities in the human mind that the ancients knew how to use."

"It's weird, but sometimes I know when I'm dreaming," said Ron. "That didn't used to happen."

"And sometimes we even share the same dream," said Kim.

"Your minds connect, without the machine," Dr. Hurlbetter said.

Belinda gave him a told-you-so smile.

"We've shared dreams like that occasionally before, but now, what, once or twice a week?" Kim said.

"Something like that," Ron agreed.

"The humanist in me says fine, go with Belinda's hypothesis, but the scientist says, hey, we seem to be proving there's some real physical basis for a violation of causality. The next question is, can anyone do it, or are our very special subjects, well, just special? They were already exceptionally attuned to each other, and Kim can anticipate laser blasts or gunfire."

"Monique told me about Yvonne," said Kim. "She had a future memory about a motorcycle accident which freaked her so much, she sold her bike."

Belinda looked upset. "Why didn't tell me that? She's— sorta like me, you know, sensitive, if not actually psychic. She's avoiding me, isn't she?"

"She got scared and you're kind of intense," said Ron. "You're cool, don't get me wrong, but—"

Belinda sighed and hung her head. "I can't help it," she said.

"It's okay," said Kim, touching Belinda's shoulder, and somehow this touch became a hug.

"Did I say something wrong?" asked Ron. "I'm sorry."

Belinda rubbed the tears from her eyes. "Yvonne and I were so close, and now— I don't like getting separated from a friend when the karma's incomplete."

"Let's pretend I don't know what that means," said Ron.

Belinda turned to him. "I believe— and I'm not the only one who believes this— that people come together for a reason, to learn from each other, to increase the total amount of intelligence and love in the universe, and— maybe it's complete between Yvonne and me, after all, but letting go can be hard—"

"I think it's time we used this machine for the purpose you originally intended," Kim told Dr. Hurlbetter. "It's portable now. Let's take it to someone who's in a coma, and see if I can wake them up."

"You haven't done this at all with anyone besides Ron," said Dr. Hurlbetter.

"Yes, and it's not the kind of intimacy I really want to share with anyone else, unless I can save their life this way. Find me someone in a coma."

"I really doubt that you're ready for a responsibility like this."

"Once I figure out how to do it, I can train you," said Kim.

"Er—"

"Doc, I think she's ready," said Ron.

* * *


End file.
